


Daybreak

by holyfant



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, Post-Hiatus, johnlockchallenges
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:52:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/578033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's chilly in John's room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daybreak

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unreliableKamikaze](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unreliableKamikaze/gifts).



> Written for majenn (unreliableKamikaze here on AO3) for her prompt: "He can't see you" for the johnlockchallenges gift exchange on tumblr. Thank you so much to hechicera for being terrific and beta'ing. <3

**Daybreak**

_He can't see you_ , Sherlock reminds himself as he steps over the threshold. _He's asleep._ John isn't like Sherlock; he doesn't fake sleep, he can't, he doesn't know how to imitate the pattern of sleeping breath, the movement of eyes under their lids. He's really asleep.

John is an unmoving shape of human under his sheets, that are drawn up almost to his ears. His covers are still tight and tucked in at the corners, the way he likes them when he goes to sleep – a sign that his rest tonight has been, so far, smooth and undisturbed. On bad nights John fights off his sheets like assailants, like they've sneaked up on him when he wasn't looking.

It's chilly in John's room. Maybe sleeping with the heating on is disorienting for John, after the cloying humidity of places like Afghanistan, where the nights only really grow cool in the deserts. Or maybe he just likes it this way, even on November nights such as this one: taking off his clothes quickly, putting them away half-folded with lingering traces of military precision, and then slipping shivering between cool sheets, warming them slowly with his own body heat. Sherlock doesn't know, and he doesn't like to theorise about things without all the facts; it's dangerous. He discards the thought, lets it slip away into the gloom. The floor beneath his bare feet is cold; he curls his toes against it, and resists the urge to rest a heel against a shin to steal body warmth from himself.

He can hear John's breathing: deep and regular and entirely vulnerable. John is gone from the world, has been for hours. It's a strange thought, a little disconcerting, and it reminds Sherlock why he doesn't like to sleep very much.

Sherlock pads over to the bed, still not quite sure what brought him here, except that it was a very sudden, very instinctual urge to check if John was still there. Somehow it wasn't enough that he _knew_ John was still there, because he hadn't heard him leave, and John would never be able to pull off leaving Baker Street in the dead of night without Sherlock noticing. He'd climbed the stairs, avoiding the creaking seventh step, and had spent a long moment in front of John's door trying to decide what it meant that it was open a crack. He doesn't know, though he feels like he should, whether John always sleeps that way. He doesn't know if John slept that way before – to have an escape route, maybe, or to hear what Sherlock was up to at night in those first months of acquaintance, during which Sherlock could tell John already trusted him so much it must have felt like betraying his own senses. He doesn't know if John had started sleeping that way at one point – to listen just in case, maybe, against all reason... But no, that point doesn't bear thinking about, not yet, because they haven't talked about it yet, not really. He doesn't know if John is just sleeping that way now, now that everything has changed again – to remind himself, or to satisfy the same sort of urge that had Sherlock getting up from the couch and climbing the stairs to John's bathroom. (Or, with a high probability: if it's a coincidence – John coming up heavy with fatigue and a dull frustration, full of words that he can think but not yet say, because that's who John is, and closing the door with not quite enough force to have it click shut completely.)

Sherlock exhales, long, steady. That he sees his breath rising in a small cloud must be his imagination playing tricks in that peculiar darkness of a bedroom at night, in which the shapes of the everyday play freely with the shadows.

John is here. He's so very still under the covers. It's a little surprising how something can be completely expected and still prompt an intense rush of relief.

Sherlock sits down on the bed very carefully. John is a small shape even in his sleep, staying neatly on one side of the two-person mattress. A habit picked up staying over with girlfriends, maybe, or developed sharing small sleeping spaces with other soldiers, or just something that John does: using space sparingly, as though he might run out.

Sherlock pulls up his feet and lies down in a slow, careful movement. He curls into a ball on the half of the bed that John isn't using, tightening his dressing gown around him against the chill. The pillow John isn't using is cool and fresh against his cheek and it smells of their washing powder. Sherlock draws up his knees, lays the warmth of his long fingers against his floor-frozen feet. John doesn't stir.

Somehow it's comfortable, this, this tense, cold way of keeping an eye on John. As Sherlock lies there, time jumps forward in sudden jolts, and he realises without urgency that that means he must be sleeping a little, catching wisps of the utter, deep unconsciousness that rolls off John in sleep-warm waves, infected by the soothing rhythm of John's breath. Every time Sherlock blinks himself awake out of his light slumber, his feet feel more like ice and John's face has gained a little more definition, as well as a pallid, washed-out colour in the grey light that precedes a dawn with the promise of snowfall.

John's room has curtains, but he never draws them. Day inches its way into the room with soft edges, like an apology. Sherlock becomes aware of the drowsy thought that he should go downstairs; John's insensible inertness is shifting into a lighter sleep of twitches, of small movements under the cover. But there is a softness, a lack of immediacy to Sherlock's thoughts, blurry with a sleepiness that for the first time in months isn't lined with the sharp mantra of _don't lose track of your bearings, stay alert, stay alert, stay alert_ , and the stubble on John's cheek grows vague with the unfocusing of his eyes before they slip closed once more.

“Oh, Jesus Chri– _Sherlock_!”

Sherlock's eyes fly open, and he's sitting up, half off the bed, ready to run, heart already pounding in his ears, mind casting about wildly for all of the available information–

“Sherlock.” The available information is: morning, cold, snow, John's bedroom, John's muffled voice hoarse with sleep, John next to him with his hands over his eyes, John.

“Take it easy,” John says, always the doctor, without taking his hands off his face. Something sinks inside Sherlock – a spike of acute fear that floats back down, that drops back as his heart rate slows down again and the pale grey of John's bedroom in the morning takes its final shape around him.

“Oh,” Sherlock says, frowning at himself.

“I almost had a heart attack, you idiot,” John says, his voice still rough from disuse, and he takes his hands away from his eyes. “You can't just... Christ. I thought you were –” He cuts himself off, grimaces as though he was about to say something extremely unsavoury, and glares up at Sherlock with sleep-wrinkled eyes. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I fell asleep,” Sherlock says.

“Well, you have a bed, don't you? I didn't throw it out.” John sounds irritated, and he hooks an arm over his eyes. What Sherlock can see of his mouth is tense.

“Yes,” is the only thing Sherlock can think of as an adequate response, because he didn't really want John to wake up with him still here; he knew perfectly well John would be deeply startled by this unannounced presence in his safe place, and then prickly, bad-tempered because of a whole host of irritations, that have to do with lots of different things, and that John can't yet express, that they can't fight about yet, because they're not yet back in that place where they can row comfortably. It's a strange thing to miss, John spelling out all of the ways in which he was angry with Sherlock, but it was better than John shielding his face like this, and his mouth so restrained.

For a moment, Sherlock entertains the idea of just getting up, opening the door, and going downstairs. Just doing what John wants and doesn't want him to do. It will save them from this, for now: this cold inertness between them, that moves between them like a wall of frozen air, and that they've been very careful to keep intact. Sherlock knows that, if they ever want to feel at ease again, it will have to come down, but he doesn't know how to do things like this when it really matters, when the outcome means so much; he really doesn't know how to start. John is good at this sort of thing, but he's been looking away like a punishment, did so even when he agreed that the flat was still Sherlock's, and why shouldn't he come back.

It's heavy, what presses Sherlock back to the bed, flat on his back, suppressing a shiver when the parts of his body that had been warmed by himself are exposed to the chill. He can't go, he can't, because he wants, he wants, he _needs_.

“Shit,” John swears softly.

Under Sherlock's palms the sheets are a little warm from when he was lying on them. The ceiling is grey, and there is a crack shaped like a large, trembly c, or the line of a closed eye.

“Okay,” John says finally in his Compromise Voice; a sigh, a decision. “Why did you come up here?”

Sherlock's possibilities are: a) lying to John, except it feels like he's done enough of that to last him at least for a few more months, so he discards it, b) saying _I wanted to see if you were still here_ and c) saying _I don't know_ , which is just as true, only less specific.

“I don't know,” he tells the ceiling, because that is the most painful for him and the least painful for John, which seems fair, in the light of. Things. He closes his eyes to shut out the crack and the grey light that is John's, that is this room's.

“Were you... checking in on me?” John sounds doubtful, as though it can't possibly be true. Sherlock can imagine the thoughtful wrinkles in his brow.

“No,” is Sherlock's automatic response.

The silence is full of something that makes Sherlock's eyes open because suddenly everything is too heavy without the walls, without the room, and he can't not, he can't not use all of his senses, the sheets cool where his body isn't and warm where it is, the cold on the front of him, the walls and the light and the crack all the same kind of grey and, more importantly: John's breath in the morning, that suddenly is there, which makes Sherlock realise that two inhales ago John was holding his breath. This thing that springs up between them makes his stomach twist suddenly. It's something that has been there before at times, but never so thick, so urgent as these past few days.

John hums, swallows. The sounds are careful like doctor's questions, and as loaded.

“You were checking on me,” he says, and he sounds quite satisfied with himself, which makes Sherlock smile a little. He turns his head so he's looking at John's profile.

“Yes,” he concedes. It's not so difficult when it comes down to it.

John shifts, and loosens himself a little out of the tight tangle of sheets he was sleeping in. He frees his arms and puts his hands under his head, as though he's some sort of demented bather on a beach with blankets.

“Jesus, it's freezing in here,” he says after a second. And then he looks at Sherlock, his face still sleep-relaxed and dawn-grey, and Sherlock wasn't expecting it, has to blink his surprise away. They hold the look, and it's almost like before, and it's also different. John looks very serious, even with his rumpled hair and his hands under his head. Between them the seconds add up, sink down, acquire a weight that makes it a little hard to breathe for some reason.

Sherlock tries, because this can't just be him, it has to be both of them: “John.” But that's as far as it can take him, because this isn't his space, and the room is still moulding to him, and the flat is still shivering with shock in getting him back, and outside London is holding its breath.

John, because he is John, picks up Sherlock's pieces. “Go on then,” he says: a soft, clear challenge for this new day.

There are many things that Sherlock thinks John expects from him, and he wants to do most of them, but there are many steps to take and he can only do so many of them at once. So he just brings up a hand and touches it to John's jaw, feelings the coarseness of stubble under his fingers and the shift of the bone as John bites down on his teeth.

John sucks in a breath at the contact.

“Yes, I'm cold,” Sherlock agrees to the unspoken thought, and slides his hand further up so his palm is fully connected to the hard line of John's jaw, and the softness where his throat begins. He doesn't actually feel cold anymore, like John's heat is flowing into his entire body from that one point where they're touching.

“Have you,” John begins, then he clears his throat – the vibration against Sherlock's hands sends a thrill through him. John seems to need a moment to compose himself, his eyes pressing closed for a second. “Have you been here long?”

“Hours,” Sherlock confirms.

“Creepier than most axe-murderers, you,” John says.

“I wouldn't say that,” Sherlock says non-committally, and, feeling bold, slides his fingers into the slot where John's jaw connects to his ear. John pushes into the contact a little, then turns his face so his lips very lightly connect with Sherlock's palm. Sherlock swallows.

“All right,” John tells the palm, agreeing to something unspoken.

“All right,” Sherlock echoes, and for a fleeting moment is unsure what to do, because there are so many... the options are overwhelming.

“Just get in here,” John says, almost resigned, and Sherlock slowly peels his hand away from John's mouth and tugs at the covers underneath him until the stiff corners give and he can slip between them. He rolls onto his side to face John, and the intensity of the stare that meets him is beautiful.

His heart hammers wildly in his rib cage when John crosses the invisible line between the two parts of the bed, and huffs: “Still letting me do all the work, I see.” John's hand on Sherlock's side is warm and light.

“You do it well,” Sherlock says, and John laughs, short and dark. He folds himself closer so they're almost body to body, not quite there, not quite enough, and Sherlock can feel the warmth of sleep and blankets radiating off John. The heat is incredibly pleasant, and more than that; it's almost like something deep inside him is melting, is turning from cold and solid into warm and liquid.

“I'm still really angry with you,” John says, and brings his face closer to Sherlock's throat, his breath moist and warm.

In a sudden rush of boldness, Sherlock brings up his arm and wraps his hand around the back of John's neck, fingers coming to rest on the gentle bumps of John's neck vertebrae. “I saved your life,” he points out, swallowing at the feeling of John tentatively pressing his mouth to the skin just over Sherlock's collarbone.

“I've saved your life dozens of times,” John mutters, and Sherlock feels the words against his throat. “Never caused me to be such a dick, did it?” There's a beat of silence. Then John says, voice going a little thready with relaxation: “Just so you know, I'm still going to... shout at you for a long time when I wake up properly.”

Sherlock almost stops the smile that tugs at his mouth, and then he reminds himself: _he can't see you, his face is pressed to your neck_ , and he lets it happen.

“Oi,” John says, sounding a little drowsy. “Get your feet away. They're like ice.”

“You're the one with your feet in my general area, that's hardly my fault,” Sherlock mumbles, and blinks a couple of times against the room, against the day, and focuses on the feeling of John breathing against him, the huff of annoyance, the warmth of John's legs when he shifts and their clothed thighs touch lightly.

The room is white. Outside, the threat of snow wavers after a few undecided, half-molten flakes. London breathes out, and Sherlock, hand on John's neck, closes his eyes.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [In the Land of Hope, there is no Winter (the Daybreak remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2207481) by [keerawa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keerawa/pseuds/keerawa)




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